Lost in Time
by SilverWolf7
Summary: The Doctor wants to talk about Rory, which is a bit hard to do when no one remembers him. Even when he slips up in front of Amy. At least he still has her. If he doesn't scare her off.


Lost in Time

There was something very much wrong with what had happened.

Oh, it wasn't that in the end Vincent still killed himself, no. It wasn't that the alien had been a bloodthirsty killer, but also a scared individual who had gone blind and been abandoned. It wasn't that both he and Amy had sunk into their own selves afterwards, him locking himself in his room and staring at the ceiling for hours, just trying to forget.

It was that he'd called out Rory's name.

Amy hadn't brought it up with him other than right after that moment, and he had been expecting her to. He wanted her to. He _needed_ her to.

Because right then, he just wanted someone else to have known Rory Williams. Someone to talk to about him. About his bravery and his normalcy and what it had done to him and life in the TARDIS.

For a few weeks, life had been bright and colourful and alive again. Amy and Rory were together, enjoying their time together and with him. He hadn't been excluded from their lives, like so many couples might have done to him.

Rory had accepted him as a part of Amy's life. And as such, he had accepted Rory as part of Amy's life back. They had both been important to her. Both her boys.

And now one of them was gone and Amy didn't even know it.

Sighing loudly to himself, he got up, put on his jacket, and wandered over to the kitchen. He wanted tea. Tea would warm his insides up a bit and might make his racing thoughts more...calm. He didn't expect Amy to be in there, staring longingly into a cup of coffee.

She had been crying. Yet again, he couldn't really blame her for it. She had rather liked Vincent, both before and during their meeting of him, and now she was mourning a friend she had made.

He made himself tea, both of them not saying a word until he was seated at the table and took his first sip of the steaming liquid.

"Was it wrong of us to do that?" Amy asked, and it startled him slightly. And confused him.

"Wrong to do what?"

"Joke about what children between me and Vincent would have been like? It feels like it is a bad thing to have done."

He sipped at his tea, thinking on that for a moment, before a small smile made it across his face and he shook his head. "No. No, I don't think it was wrong. Personally, I hope that it is the kind of reaction Vincent would have wanted us to have made. He wanted people to understand what it was he loved, how he saw things, and before he died we gave him that. If we can smile and joke and laugh about our time with him, it means that we learnt something too. It doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't mourn him. It means we enjoyed our little time spent with him. We mattered to him, but he also mattered to us. We aren't hurting his memory. I see it more as honouring it."

A smile, small and fragile, made its way onto Amy's face. She nodded, sipped at the coffee, before making a ridiculous face at him.

"Coffee's gone cold! How could I have let that happen?"

Laughing, the Doctor shook his head, drank his tea, before grabbing her mug to go make her a hot cup. "Well, that's easily fixed. So, any plans on what you want to do next?"

She looked down at the table, tracing grains in the wood with her fingertips, before nodding. "I want you to tell me about him."

"Vincent? But you met him. You know what he was like."

She shook her head, looked him straight in the eye and said the name he was both dreading and hoping she'd say. "No, Rory."

He froze, knowing that this was icy ground he was treading on. "I don't know what to say about him..."

"Well, he must have been travelling with you at one point. You said my name and Rory's. But I haven't met a Rory before."

Closing his eyes and grabbing the counter hard in his hands, he spent a few seconds trying to catch his breath. Amy not remembering Rory was something that was a very sore point with him, especially since it only happened not long ago.

"He was...well, pretty much normal. He was a lovely man. Intelligent, but a little silly at times. Brave, though he never really knew how brave he could be until he met me. He was engaged to a wonderful woman, but he never made it to his wedding day."

Amy's eyebrow cocked up at that. "He skipped his own wedding? Bet the missus wasn't too happy with that."

"No, she wasn't. Considering Rory died saving my life. Someone shot at me and he took the bullet. Well, laser more like. Or blast. Not so much a bullet. And he died before I could do anything to save him. His body was taken by one of the cracks. Now it's like he never existed to anyone else but me..."

He watched Amy's face closely, looking for some sort of recognition, but he never got it. Instead he saw shock, worry and lastly horror pass over her face, before stopping at sadness. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know. Must be hard, to be the only one that remembers. Guess that's one of the benefits of time travel. You're so far removed from the normal flow of time, that you remember things that most people would forget when things go through the cracks."

His face fell and he nodded. Now he wanted to be alone not so much to think as to not get weepy in front of Amy. "Yes. I miss him. I guess I was just expecting him to be there in that situation. I...I don't know why."

He did, but he couldn't tell Amy. Not now. If she learnt that she was the bride to be, then how would she take it? Her memory of things disappearing in the cracks was that she'd remember because she was travelling with him. But she was a part of Rory's world. The memories were wiped from her anyway, regardless of the whole time travelling thing.

He rubbed at the back of his head, turned around and decided that maybe it would be best if he didn't drink anymore. He forgot about Amy's coffee.

She followed him out to his bedroom, and crept in after he fell onto his bed, wishing desperately for sleep. He was so utterly tired. "I'm tired, Amy. Please go away."

"You just walked out on me, Doctor. You're sad. You just lost another person you liked. It can't be easy. I like him too, you know."

For one second, he honestly thought she was talking about Rory, and turned to face her, only to see her holding up her art exhibit book. And it was as if everything he had been trying to do to be nice to her, for her, take her places she wanted to go, things she wanted to see, had evaporated.

"Go away! You're just making everything worse!" he yelled at her, before throwing himself across his bed in the most undignified way ever and stared blankly at the wall, until he could hear her move to the door.

"Fine. I'll come back later."

The door of his room closed and he felt like he could breathe again. He knew it was probably wrong of him to kick her out, but right then he needed to be alone. Seeing her was making everything he had lost recently so much harder to cope with.

He closed his eyes, evened out his breathing and tried his hardest to fall asleep, but it was no good. His mind was racing with memories he was beginning to wish he had forgotten too, and instead he was getting a headache.

Groaning in frustration, he hit his pillow, got up off his bed again and decided he should probably go and apologise to Amy before getting something for his head and trying to rest.

He wasn't expecting to almost trip over her when he opened up the door, but he did. Because she was sitting right outside. Sighing, he sat down beside her, the door to his room clicking shut as he leant against the wall of the TARDIS.

"I'm sorry. For the yelling. You remind me a bit of Rory, that's all."

She looked up at him with a smirk on her face. "Really? I remind you of this guy I don't even know? Am I to be flattered, or run screaming?"

He grinned back at her and shook his head. "Do you want to run? Wouldn't be the first time someone has run away from me."

A frown replaced the smirk on her face and she leant towards him, putting her head on his shoulder and patted his knee. "Nah. No running. Not from you at least."

Nodding, he tried to put into words what he meant in a way she might understand it. "You are...a lot like him. Except you're much more confident than he was. When I see you, I see him. It's not meant in any way about your gender or his. It's just...I see you together in my head."

She grabbed his arm and gave it a friendly squeeze, which didn't really do anything for him at all, though he thought it was supposed to be a comforting gesture. He placed his hand over hers and managed to smile at her. "I'm getting a headache with all this thinking. Let's just...stop for the moment, alright?"

Amy nodded and sprang to her feet. "Okay. Tell you what. You go lie down for a bit and I will think of where to go next. Or, if you want, we could go somewhere Rory wanted to go, if you know any place like that."

The smile fell off his face. He got slowly to his feet, feeling every one of his years. "No...I don't. I didn't know him that well. He was only pretty much new to the TARDIS way of life when it happened. Still, he was magnificent in his own way. All the people who travel with me are. I wouldn't have chosen to take him with me otherwise."

Amy nodded and left him alone in the corridor, probably sensing that he wanted to be alone. He went to the med bay, found something for his headache, took it and then went back to his bedroom.

He stayed there, on his own, for a full 24 hours.

He would have stayed there longer, if the TARDIS hadn't made his bed disappear on him to get him up and on his feet. After that, every time he went to sit down, the seat would magically disappear.

When Amy found this out when he went to get something to eat, she laughed. She learnt fast to never tease him about matters to do with his relationship with the TARDIS ever again.

It was only after he had stopped yelling at her that he noticed that maybe the TARDIS was doing it for a good reason. That Amy didn't know about his own moods and how he got when people died around him nowadays. Especially people he liked or were his friends and companions.

He couldn't lose his ability to cope with it. He needed that ability.

If he lost that, he'd find himself unable to go on.

Damn. His track record with this face had been going so well too. A lot more mellow and calm than his last. Though his last had gone a bit mental in the end too. His mood right now fit right in with his past self though.

Dark and stormy.

No, it was more than that. He felt lost and confused and uncertain of what to do next. He wanted to make sure that Amy was happy, because it was impossible right now, due to the grief he was feeling, to feel happy himself.

Due to his _guilt_.

Sometimes it felt like all the things that went bad in the universe happened to him.

He couldn't lose hope that there will be good times again.

Until that time, he'd have to make sure to see that Amy was happy and engaged in whatever activity she wanted to be doing at the time, and to make sure he didn't lash out at her. He'd make sure that he got up and joined in, even if he didn't feel like it at the time. He'd have to make sure she knew that he was probably going to be up and down like a yoyo for a while.

When Amy came over to his side and pulled him into a hug and kissed the top of his head in a way he was usually doing to her, he understood that she got that he probably wasn't going to be easy to live with for a while.

It was enough to lift his mood a bit from the gloom it had been since last night.


End file.
